Carleton College's summer programs invite you to develop skills and challenge yourself academically in a rigorous but supportive learning community.

Located in Northfield, Minnesota—just 45 minutes south of the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul—Carleton College offers both the serenity of a small-town campus and the cultural opportunities of a major metropolitan area. More about Carleton ».

The Summer Teaching institute is a week-long workshop for teachers of existing or proposed Advanced Placement, enriched, or accelerated classes in grades 7-12. Since 1980, Carleton has hosted more than 5,000 teachers from over 660 schools.

Summer Academic Programs

The Summer Writing Program emphasizes a writing process approach, teaching you how to compose academic papers similar to those you will write in college. The program is designed for college-bound students with strong reading and writing abilities.

The Carleton Summer Science Institute will help students learn to think and write like a scientist by doing science. CSSI students, faculty, and Carleton undergraduate research assistants will engage in classroom and hands-on research related to faculty and student interests.

The Summer Quantitative Reasoning Institute is designed to give high school sophomores and juniors a substantial college-level experience in how social scientists think about the world, measure important variables of study, prepare research, and present their findings. Students will examine theories in three core disciplines - Economics, International Relations and Psychology.

Students will learn how to systematically approach problems like a computer scientist as they engage in classroom learning, hands-on lab activities, and collaborative guided research directed by Carleton faculty and mentored by undergraduate research assistants. The program will culminate with a Research Symposium where students will demonstrate the results of their collaborative guided research project.

The world is a complicated place—a tangle of languages and cultures and market forces. We’ve devised the Summer Language and Global Issues Institute to show how these entities are intertwined. While giving students an experience of language immersion in French or Spanish, we also provide an introduction to a global topic (this year: immigration) that reveals how language, culture, religion, history, economics and politics converge to influence the flow of populations.

The Summer Humanities Institute is a three week program in which students develop and present interdisciplinary, guided research projects in History (including art historical topics) or literature and theater, and acquire tools and techniques of research, interpretation, and presentation essential to achieve the goal of humanistic research: to understand with depth and complexity the nature of human thought, action, and expression.

The Summer Teaching institute is a week-long workshop for teachers of existing or proposed Advanced Placement, enriched, or accelerated classes in grades 7-12. Since 1980, Carleton has hosted more than 5,000 teachers from over 660 schools nationwide.